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Thresholds not frames: interview with Mark Leckey

(Originally published in Kaleidoscope magazine)

MARK FISHER: Maybe we could start off by talking about the role of popular culture in your work. Why the focus on popular culture? MARK LECKEY: Popular culture is just things that are immediate to me. When I was in college in the ’80s, I found everything too detached or ironic, and I didn’t want to make work like that; I couldn’t make work just out of critical disinterestedness. I decided that I should use as material my own history and background. “Theory Tube” is a way of digesting things that have happened to me individually, but also a history of how I understood myself. MARK FISHER: A lot of your projects could easily be classified as video-essays; they have a story that holds them together, which comes out of research. What do you think about the relationship between research and art? MARK LECKEY: I slightly despair. I see a lot of student shows now, and they look like they’re libraries. I think the weight of research is outweighing all kinds of artistic concerns at the moment.

MARK FISHER: So it’s not the research that you don’t find interesting; it’s when research is a substitute for everything else. What is “everything else”?

MARK LECKEY: Research has to go through a body; it has to be lived in some sense—transformed into something that is lived—in order to become whatever we might call art. A lot of art now points at things. Merely the transfer of something into a gallery is enough to bracket it as art. It’s kind of weak. MARK FISHER: I sometimes wonder about my own relationship to a lot of this material. As a critic, you sometimes feel you’re being brought in to provide the content, or to provide the work with consistency that it actually lacks. You can get away with much more in an artwork than you can in a work of philosophy or cultural theory. I think this situation is partly influenced by post-structuralism, which, as I see it, has become a kind of religious piety. The other month, I was speaking to artists, saying that I believe artists should impose things on their audience. The predictable response to that was “That’s a very old fashioned idea of art.” I said, “Well, I think your view is now old fashioned—the standard, postmodern view that the artist shouldn’t oppress people by providing content.” There’s this pervasive idea that any kind of determinant statement is oppressive, but how is it art if you’re not subjecting people to things in some way? MARK LECKEY: I think post-structuralism relies on the promise of a different relationship between the viewer and the object (or non-object). People aren’t sure about what an image or object is anymore. They’re not sure how things are fixed or where they belong. If something can be a jpeg online, what is it when you print it out and put it up in a gallery? Increasingly, there’s this confusion, this anxiety, about the status of things, which seems to feed into what you’re talking about. There is a sense that the object and the subject are themselves nodes or parts or networks of understanding, and that therefore, work can only have agency or be activated in this network—rather than as an autonomous object. There’s a real fear in that. MARK FISHER: That becomes an alibi for not producing objects that have any effect. There is an epistemological claim —that the object doesn’t exist apart from people’s relationship with it—and then there’s a moral claim —that one shouldn’t impose things on people anyway. Given those discourses, it’s no wonder that artists feel hemmed in and that there’s a lot of anxiety. MARK LECKEY: For me, the only way out of this research problem is to proliferate those nodes, to extend them further and further out, so that what you get is a dispersed work. There is no center, and there is no object to look at; there’s just this nodal network. That can be quite appealing, quite exciting. MARK FISHER: There is something interesting about the distributed form. I was thinking of H.P. Lovecraft: there’s a sense that his work is not about any one of the stories, but rather about the set of the stories taken together, which composes a world that other writers can then join. The degraded version of that kind of collective fiction is Tolkien. This is now a widespread tendency in capitalist commodities: take films, where the the tendency is for the film to be at the centre of a whole matrix of commodities rather than existing on its own. Film is an interesting model of collaborative art: it opens up the possibility of a post-cinematic, collectively-constituted, genuine, distributed art that has actual content. That’s the difference. A lot of this stuff that you’re talking about is distributed form, but the network delivers no content of its own. What if you could deliver things in this distributed way, and it actually had content? MARK LECKEY: Well, that’s the problem: content is elsewhere. The difficulty in making work now is that there’s this model of how a distributed kind of collective work could be made (i.e., through the Internet), but it can’t be made in a gallery. The nature, or structure, of the gallery doesn’t allow for that; it needs certain kinds of forms, certain objects. You can look at it as an expanded field for sculpture, which exists between the material and immaterial realms. You can make work within both. That possibility for producing work seems really exciting.

There’s this idea from the Internet: an ant, goes out, lays a path of pheromones; the other ants follow that path; and then that path gets built up until it becomes a pathway. They use this in open-source encoding to create a way of making something, while keeping the origin unknown. As an idea of making art, that seems really interesting—something made with the benefits of technology. At the same time, that idea is a long way from the art being made now, and a long way from Benjamin’s idea of art’s aura The aura is still there; it still surrounds artworks, massively. The trouble is that once you start to distribute art or disperse it, it becomes more erratic, until finally, it dissipates into just lolcats or something. MARK FISHER: We’ve seen a lot of this rhetoric around student protests. A lot of the discourse surrounding those protests is naive regurgitation of ’90s cyber-rhetoric: concentration is bad; distribution is good. I think we’re beyond a stage where that works anymore. It’s quite clear that distribution is our condition. It’s neither good nor bad: it’s just how things are. Actually, I’ll go further than that: you can have things that are top-down and distributive.

MARK LECKEY: I see a lot of the stuff on the Internet as a realization of ideas from ’80s rave culture.

MARK FISHER: In the sense of…?

MARK LECKEY: In the sense that the Internet allows concentrations of things to manifest, to self-generate or come together into some kind of body.

MARK FISHER: I get it, but I think that concentrationhas gone against the dominant tendencies of the internet.

MARK LECKEY: No, I don’t think it has. We’re so immersed in it; it’s so new and it needs to concentrate. That’s the point of this argument: you have to consciously make a body out of these things. There has to be a program in art-making and in politics, and we have to gather these things together. I still think that the Internet’s technological possibilities allow for that, more so than ever.

MARK FISHER: I think that’s the crucial distinction that you’ve made, between the idea that the Internet by itself will deliver this and the idea that you need, not a critical relation to it, so much as a practical orientation.

MARK LECKEY: Or historical.

MARK FISHER: Given that the prevailing ideological currents are individuating, the tendency has been for the Internet to invent new forms of solitude—a connective solitude. People are realizing that you can use the Internet to do other things, but you have to get outside it first, to instrumentalize it instead of being instrumentalized by it.

MARK LECKEY: This is the frustration I have with art at the moment, with these—for want of a better word—cyborg sculptures. When I go to colleges and talk about this idea of abandoning yourself to the infinite platter of Internet desire, or whatever… I want to say that there’s a lack of historical materialism, but maybe that’s too loaded. There’s just a lack of personal history, an understanding of lived experience. In art schools now, you finish your B.A., you do an M.A., and then you go straight into a gallery system. So it’s hard to talk about having an experience outside of the art world, but it seems entirely necessary. There has to be something else beyond art practice.

MARK FISHER: We’re talking about the general crisis of concentration.

MARK LECKEY: It’s an erasure of the existential subject, twentieth-century man. The current state of technology denies you that kind of crisis; instead, you have another kind of existential crisis, and have to accept yourself as a networking social creature, which is quite at odds with the individual, self-actualizing, “Thatcherite-being” you’d always supposed yourself to be.

MARK FISHER: For me, the issue is thresholds not frames. It seems to me that art could learn a lot from theme parks or video games. Instead of providing this neutral space, which no one knows what to do with anymore, art spaces could be constructing thresholds into a place where, like in a video game, everything in the space is significant.

MARK LECKEY: That’s the expanded field of sculpture. That is what I was going to say before about the desire to be immersed in things. There is a melancholic desire to be in an image, which is really promising and maybe realizable in some three- or four-dimensional televisual way. I think part of this desire is a sense of seeking out an expanded sculpture, which includes the concentration we were speaking about as well. It is a lot easier to get your head around these things if you think of sculpture rather than framing, because you can step into a sculpture. I think that’s what art needs: something that you can get inside.

#readings #x2

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